Listen First, Scale Later: Building Organizations From the Inside Out

Jacob Adams is the Founder and Executive Director of Inner Spark Learning Lab, an organization dedicated to creating educational environments where young people experience belonging, joy, and meaningful opportunities to shape their communities. Beginning his career as a Teach For America corps member and later serving as an instructional coach, Jacob developed a passion for transforming education through community engagement and student-centered learning. Through his Listen, Learn, Adapt framework, he challenges traditional approaches to organizational growth, emphasizing deep listening, authentic partnerships, and sustainable impact. His work offers valuable lessons for nonprofit leaders seeking to build stronger organizations from the inside out.

Website: www.innersparklab.org

 

The Interview Summary

What if the secret to growing a successful nonprofit isn’t reaching more people, but listening more deeply to the people you already serve?

In this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange, host Hugh Ballou welcomes Jacob Adams, Founder and Executive Director of Inner Spark Learning Lab, for a thought-provoking conversation about organizational growth, meaningful impact, and the power of listening.

Jacob shares how his organization shifted from an ambitious strategy of reaching thousands of students across Los Angeles to a more intentional approach focused on understanding the needs, experiences, and aspirations of individual students and their communities. That decision challenged conventional assumptions about nonprofit growth but opened the door to deeper learning, stronger relationships, and more meaningful change.

At the center of the conversation is Jacob’s Listen, Learn, Adapt framework, an approach that encourages organizations to engage directly with the people they serve, experiment with solutions, and continuously refine their work based on what they discover.

Rather than asking how to increase school attendance, for example, Jacob challenges educators to ask a fundamentally different question: What would make school a place children actually want to be?

Hugh and Jacob explore how this shift in thinking applies far beyond education, offering valuable insights for nonprofit executives, board members, fundraisers, and community leaders.

Key Topics Explored

• Listen, Learn, Adapt: Building organizations that continually learn from the communities they serve.
• Asking Better Questions: Why traditional measures of success can distract organizations from addressing the real problems.
• The Cost and Gain of Going Deep: Understanding the financial, operational, and relational trade-offs of prioritizing depth over rapid expansion.
• Scaling What Matters: Discovering how organizations can expand their influence by sharing what they learn rather than simply replicating programs.
• Funders as Partners: Moving beyond transactional fundraising to develop relationships built on shared values, trust, and mutual learning.
• Building From the Inside Out: Creating organizations whose strategies and programs emerge from authentic community needs rather than external assumptions.

A Powerful Leadership Insight

One of Jacob’s most compelling observations captures the central message of this conversation:

“We should be scaling what we learn more than we scale what we do.”

This perspective invites nonprofit leaders to reconsider how they define success, evaluate impact, engage their communities, and communicate with funders.

A Practical Takeaway

Jacob challenges every nonprofit leader to take one immediate action: Go talk to the community.

Ask thoughtful questions. Listen without assuming you already know the answers. Discover what people actually want and need. Then use what you learn to inform your next decisions.

This episode offers an important reminder that sustainable organizational growth begins with trust, curiosity, meaningful relationships, and a willingness to adapt.

About Jacob Adams

Jacob Adams is the Founder and Executive Director of Inner Spark Learning Lab, an organization dedicated to creating educational environments where young people experience belonging, relevance, joy, and meaningful opportunities to shape their communities. His work emphasizes community-centered learning, youth participation, organizational adaptability, and systemic change.

Learn more: Inner Spark Learning Lab

Watch or listen to this episode of The Nonprofit Exchange and discover why listening first may be the most important leadership strategy for scaling what truly matters.

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou

Welcome to the The Nonprofit Exchange. I’m Hugh Ballou. Today we’re looking at a question that challenges one of the most common assumptions in the nonprofit sector. Is growth always the goal or should listening come first? My guest is Jacob Adams, founder and executive director of InnerSpark Learning Lab. Jacob and his team learned firsthand what can happen when an organization stops trying to scale wide and chooses instead to go deep. We’ll explore his Listen, Learn, Adapt framework, why nonprofits may be asking the wrong questions, and how donors and communities can become true partners rather than transaction. Here’s some more about Jacob. He began his career as Teach For America corps member, later served as an instructional coach and founded the organization to help create learning environments rooted in joy, belonging, critical thinking, and community connection. InnerSpark reports serving more than 40,000 young people and describes its work as a continuous learning cycle that tests ideas, listens to participants, and refines practice and shares what is learned. So, Jacob, welcome to the The Nonprofit Exchange. And let’s start with your organization started out trying to scale wide, and then you made a deliberate decision to go deep instead. What happened that caused you to question the growth path that you were on?

Jacob Adams

Yeah, this is a good question, Hugh. One of the main things is when I took a step back and just noticed how much time we were spending on putting out fires, it was like we were just getting really good at putting out fires, because the more schools we were trying to be in, the more people we needed. The more people you need, usually the more problems can come with that. And so that was one thing. It was just so much of our time, and all these smart people on the team, and so much of their energy is being put towards logistical things, or just really into logistics. And that was so we could do pretty low-touch programming at a lot of schools across L.A.. So that was one part of it. And then the other part we got commissioned by this after-school provider that has schools all across L.A., and they hit us up to make curriculum for their after-school program. And at that year, so we made the curriculum and then we would train their staff and the curriculum was like in 500-something schools. But we never got to talk to those, I mean, it’s probably 20,000–25,000 kids. We didn’t get to talk to those 20,000–25,000 kids. It was so hard for us to know what was working, what wasn’t working. And some of the kids were in Northern California, some of the kids were in Southern California. Even within the different parts of the state, even within the same schools in the same city, the kids got different interests. So we’ve made this curriculum that is just supposed to work for 25,000 kids. I think that’s probably impossible to do, or at least very hard to do. And we can’t even talk to them, so we can’t even adapt it. So it’s like, well, our goal isn’t just to have our curriculum in front of a bunch of kids. The goal is to actually be able to create something that allows kids to learn who they are, what they care about, how can they use what they learn to have a positive impact on themselves, the neighborhood, the community. We couldn’t do that because we didn’t have the time to focus on that because we’re just focused on trying to get our stuff in front of as many kids as possible. So we had to pump the brakes and really decide to go deep instead of just trying to scale wide like that.

Hugh Ballou

That’s great wisdom. Some of us feel like we’re trapped in a rut and we don’t step back. So the title that you gave us for today’s episode is Listen First, Scale Later, Building Organizations from the Inside Out. So talk a little bit about your Listen, Learn, Adapt. That’s more than just a framework.

Jacob Adams

Yeah, so Listen, Learn, Adapt is a framework that we basically have used. It’s based off of another framework called Human Learning Systems, which was made by Toby Lowe. But the idea is that we can’t produce outcomes. We can’t deliver outcomes. A kid’s life is, I mean really anybody, but in our instance, a kid’s life is way too complex for our organization to be able to promise that we can change a kid. We can’t draw a straight line from what we do to the outcomes that come out of the student. Sure, we can contribute to them, but I’m sure their teacher contributes, their family contributes, the neighborhood, the media, all this stuff. All these different external factors are playing a role in these outcomes, so it’s like life is too complicated to say these outcomes were created by us. So instead of trying to deliver these outcomes, what we’re doing is really trying to learn, in our case, our main question is what makes school a place kids want to be? Because our hypothesis is if you can make school a place where kids actually want to come every day, all these other outcomes that people are trying to deliver, whether it’s an increase in attendance, better reading outcomes or math outcomes, better youth well-being, you want to do that, but you’ll never be able to do that at scale if you don’t change the environment first. So we’re focused on how do you make school a place kids wanna be? We don’t know, we’re grown, we’re not children. So what do we do? We talk to the kids. So even right now at our learning lab, we’re almost done, but we spent like the last two weeks doing focus group interviews with every third- through fifth-grader, asking them questions that are helping us understand how they experience school. So that’s the listen phase. And then the next phase is like learn. So we’ll take what we hear from the students, and then we’ll actually, we’ll come up with some experiments, basically, that we could run that are aligned with what the kids are saying they want in school. And then we’ll also present the data to the kids, and we’ll have them come up with things they want to do within their school that will help the school start to become a place they want to be. Then the third phase is adapt. So we’ll run the experiments, and then we’ll have another set of data we could see, like, OK, what worked, what didn’t work. And now, how can we take what we’ve learned to be able to share it with the school community? How can we share it more broadly with the education community? And then the last thing, and then in the spring, we’re going to interview all kids, like K–5 students, like 400 kids. We’ll interview everybody all over again, so we can start to learn how the experiments impacted their school experience. So then we can use the summer to start to plan the next phase of experiments that we’re going to run. And we just go round and round in this feedback loop with the goal of like, again, centering everything we do around what the kids, the families, the teachers are telling us.

Hugh Ballou

So you put the brakes on, you said. And so what would you say to, there’s a lot of nonprofit leaders that I see that they have this assumption, they’ve learned certain things in their certain culture. And we’ve got this culture, you gotta grow, you gotta scale, you gotta impact more people. So what would you say to the people that feel trapped in that cycle? How did you put on the brakes and how did you get your team around that paradigm?

Jacob Adams

It still is tough because so much funding can be attached to scaling, like why, you know, just getting your numbers up so you could feel like you have to. But for me, it was like, you know, I started this thing like nine years ago, and if I just wanted to do somebody else’s idea of what a nonprofit should be, I’d just go work for somebody else. There’s no need to start something just to become the version of the thing that I was trying to get away from. So one of the first things I would ask nonprofit leaders is like, Why are you scaling? Why do you feel like you need to grow in that way?” And really try to push them to get to the root of it. And then the other thing I would say is just challenging this idea of growing and scaling. Because we know more now about what it’s like to be a kid, how a kid experiences school just by talking to these 200, 400 kids deeply. Then we knew when we were, we had 25,000, you know, when our curriculum was in front of 25,000 kids. So, and now we can take that now. Well, one, we’ve been able to create a model for how to listen and adapt within a school. Now we can go train other schools on that model. And then the more schools and the more organizations that we train on the model, the more we learn about what are these enabling conditions that make school a place kids want to be. And then we can share that with other people so that, one, they can run the model themselves, and they can run these experiments and be able to discover these conditions. So we are scaling. We’re just not doing it. We’re not popping up our program everywhere. We just, like, by going deep, we can learn how to learn, and then we go share that with others.

Hugh Ballou

you’re building a solid foundation. So in my work, one of the most underutilized leadership skills is listening. Now, the other one, this goes with listening, it’s asking questions. So you refer to, you talk about people asking the wrong questions. So you’ve said that you like to push back on the quick-fix and reform narratives. Why are some people asking the wrong questions?

Jacob Adams

I think it’s because in our culture, and then especially at nonprofits, you need to prove something works. So an education example, which I think most people can wrap their head around, because we’ve all experienced it for the most part, but attendance is a key outcome that schools track. So the questions that schools usually ask is, how can we increase attendance? The answer to that could be a lot of things. One thing you could do, I mean, I’m going to say this stuff and it’s going to sound wild, but it’s true. One thing you could do, you could lock the parents up if the kids don’t come to school. You know, that’s if your kid, I mean, that’s laws on the books in a lot of places. If your kids miss school enough, the parents could go to jail. Then you have truancy. You could lock the kids up if they’re old enough and they’re not coming to school. You could put them in jail. Again, that’s a real, sounds wild, but it’s a real law. And then another thing I’ve seen people do on the other end of the spectrum, but still. Not the right question, is they’ll pay kids to come to school. I’m all for kids getting money, but if the incentive is if you’re coming to school because you’re afraid you’re going to go to jail, your parents are sending you there because they don’t want to get locked up and they just need somewhere for you to go while they go to work, or third, you’re only coming because you’re getting paid. Like if the goal is just to get a bunch of people in the building, those things are good ideas. But if the goal is you want kids to come to school because you want them to learn, you want them to be curious, you want them to be productive citizens, those three things only work if you can assume what goes on in the school already does that, and it doesn’t. So different question, what would it take for kids to be excited to come here every day? And now that’s a totally different process of that creates a totally different scope of work. So like, if your goal is just focused on how can we achieve that outcome, you can do it a lot of ways. But then again, I go back to what’s the ultimate outcome? Is it just to get kids in the building? Cool, we could do that. If it’s to create a generation of kids who are excited to learn, we got to come up with something else.

Hugh Ballou

So that brings me to this thought. We want to measure impact and funders look for impact money listens for impact but as you’re talking like it’s way out of proportion if we answer why we’re doing this and if you’re creating a a lasting change with people, it might be on a different scale and a different question. So we measure things. So talk about measuring what matters. How do we decide what matters and how do we measure that? Because we’re here to make a difference in people’s lives and you’ve found a niche. So how do you measure yours?

Jacob Adams

Yeah, the way even my our team is evaluated is like on their ability to, well, you know, listen, learn, adapt. But through the the listening, because we’ll have people on the team work with students and family, and then another person on the team works with teachers. But like, in both of those, we’re really trying to learn like, what for the kids, what does it take in the families? Again, what does it take to make this school a place kids wanna be? And then from there, we’re measuring like the quality of our listening. Like, did we ask the right questions? Did our process allow us to actually be able to conduct, like, did we have the trust or the other relationships needed to be able to actually have these discussions with the community so that they would be honest with us? Then did our, like the things we tried, not necessarily did they achieve XYZ outcome, but did they feel aligned with what the community told us they wanted? And the only way for us to know that is to go talk to the kids and the families and the teachers again. So one of the things we’re, and then from there, it kind of keeps going, but then from there, Through those tests, we’re able to create policy, like basically come up with policy recommendations for the schools or the districts that help them start to adapt to the kids and the families. So another thing we’ll measure is like, are we able to get these policies to the school and to the district? Ultimately, it’s up to them. Like, it’s not on us to make them enact the policies. Like, we can’t do that. A funder would love for us to say that, but like, We can’t, that’s not our job. We can just come, we can just run the experiments, we come up with the evidence, we come up with the proof, and then we can try to partner with districts, you know, partner with districts and schools to help them try to change the policy. But those are really the, and then the last thing, and the other thing we’re being, we’re evaluating and measuring is like, are we discovering these enabling conditions that are making school a place kids wanna be? We like belonging, relevance, joy. Those things keep coming up. We keep discovering more. But what are these enabling conditions? Are we able to discover them? And then are the experiments we’re running, are they helping us better understand how to create those conditions for the kids, the families, and the teachers we work with?

Hugh Ballou

So have you had some kids go through the program, graduate or whatever happens, and then come back and tell you, I appreciate what you taught me?

Jacob Adams

Yeah, oh, for sure. This model I’m describing now, we just started. It’s like nine years old. But we’ve always been adapting. So this model, we’re in the second year of this. But this came from a group of kids where we had this after-school program where we used this framework called Youth Participatory Action Research. But the kids were doing research about the community. And then they would come up with their own ideas things they could do to help meet unmet needs that came up in the research. And that program, we’d have to adapt it weekly based off what the kids were researching. And what we saw in there was, what we saw in that program is what led us to be able to, oh, sorry. What we saw in that program is what led us to realize that like, oh, the thing that actually has the biggest influence on the outcomes, I guess, the experience of the kids, is the program’s ability to adapt to them. And so then… We’ve had kids in that program who have now, they’re like third grade, fourth grade, some have gone on to, now that they’re older, there’s this video where we were interviewing this mom and one of the girls that was in the program, and the mom was just breaking down in tears because she was like, Her and her daughter’s dad are split, and he lives in a more affluent part of town, and they live over here in South Central. And she was like, prior to being in the program, her daughter just looked at her neighborhood with such a deficit and always wanted to go to her dad’s neighborhood. She felt like it was nicer. And now she sees her neighborhood totally different. She sees the assets in it. She sees the opportunity in it. Is it what she wants it to be? No. But now she has an idea of what it can be, and she feels confident in her ability her and her community’s ability to be able to change it. So I think about that a lot. Like, and again, if we just focus on outcomes, like can we get, how many kids can we get interested in STEM? Because a lot of what we were doing at the time was STEM. That’s one thing. But by just being able to create this program that adapts to the kids and really puts the power onto them, we change, like this kid has changed the whole, the way she sees the world, which I think is way more beneficial than a more like rigid outcome.

Hugh Ballou

Sometimes we make decisions about children and not giving them credit. Part of my life, I taught middle school music, which was not something I ever thought I would do. But I did a full production of Godspell, which is a very complex, difficult musical with sixth graders. And people said, well, it was difficult. How did you do it with sixth graders? And I said, I never told them it was difficult. And it was amazing. They were stars, but they just did it. So we tend to, you know, what the kind of work you’re doing impacts a whole culture for generations. So go back a minute and talk about there’s a, there’s a cost and a benefit, both from going deep, the, the cost and the gain of going deep. Talk about your experience and the trade-off there.

Jacob Adams

Yeah, the most difficult part, I would say, for me at least, is being able to explain the that to funders, and there’s also just, you know, a lot of funders who are focused on scale. And for them, a lot of them, I think that they’re asking the wrong questions, but they’re really focused on how can we get these interventions in front of as many people as possible. And it’s like, all right, so I’ve had to just be like, oh, those people are not our partners for now. Like, we just don’t make sense for us to work with them. We got different philosophy. So I think it has really narrowed the, like amount of people, like amount of funders that are there for us, like it’s cut out a lot, but also the benefit of that is like that’s less people we got to build relationships with. So, you know, it makes it clearer for who we could potentially work with. So that’s been a cost and a benefit. I would say also too, just like you need to make sure you’ve built an organization that can adapt. Because you’re going to hear things, if you do it right, you’re going to hear things from the community that you didn’t anticipate. So you need to be able to figure out, okay, out of all these things we’re learning, What do we have the ability like what is aligned with our mission, and then other things, people are going to tell you, it’s not for you to do but then how you create the, the infrastructure to be able to share that information with the other stakeholders other nonprofits other organizations in the neighborhood who can actually help. Who can address those things that the people have told you. So that’s been like another, again, you learn a lot, but then you need to be able to have the infrastructure to not just sit on what you learn, like you need to know what you can change and then how can you share the information that doesn’t fall within your expertise. Yeah, those are the first things that come to mind.

Hugh Ballou

Good wisdom. Part of your title is building organizations from the inside out. What does that mean to you?

Jacob Adams

Yeah, I think it’s actually doing the work that, like the work is truly informed by the community. In education, there’s like student-centered, that’s like a buzzword. I mean, within nonprofits, there’s place-based. I think that’s kind of another way to think about it. But you could be place-based. You could have an organization that’s in a neighborhood, but all the nonprofits could be doing work that’s being informed by the funder or being informed by people not from the neighborhood. So like it could, again, it could be place based but the work isn’t really coming from the place is coming into the place. So I think about, think about that it’s like how well inside out. How can you ensure the work you’re doing is actually informed. But how do you have the structure in place to ensure that the work is actually informed by the community? And it continues to be. You just don’t ask them once, do something, and then keep it moving. It’s a continuous cycle of listening, learning, and adapting. And you need to always be checking in with the community to ensure what you’re doing is actually what they want and what they need, not what the funder wants or what they need.

Hugh Ballou

You’ve done a lot at a young age. I’m 80, so you’re way young. So tell people where they can find your website.

Jacob Adams

For sure. Innersparklab.org is the website. We’re actually switching it up because we don’t even have our new model on there yet, but you know, one thing at a time. But on the website, you can learn more about our old programs. So we’ll have the new ones on there. Um, we’re actually hiring right now to, uh, a, um, director of development. So soon later today, if you click the, uh, the get involved button, you’ll be able to see, um, the job posting. We have our blog. We’ll look a lot of our writings. There’s like a press button. So as soon as I have the link to this, I’ll make sure we have this up there for folks to see. Um, you know, you can donate, obviously you can meet the team.

Hugh Ballou

Join the Disruptors, I love it.

Jacob Adams

Yeah, the Disruptors, that’s our monthly gathering.

Hugh Ballou

innersparklab.org. So, hey, let’s have some fun. I’m going to do a series of rapid fire questions, okay? All right, cool. What is one question every nonprofit leader should ask before pushing growth?

Jacob Adams

Is this work the community actually wants and needs? How do I know?

Hugh Ballou

That’s a two-part question. Good. What is one sign that an organization is listening well? They’re always changing. And what’s one sign that a donor relationship has become a transactional relationship and not a personal relationship? You feel a little icky after you talk to them. What is one thing that leaders should be paying more attention to? Their community. What is one belief about nonprofit growth that you’ve changed your mind about?

Jacob Adams

We should be scaling what we learn. More than we scale what we do. Whoa.

Hugh Ballou

Oh, good answer. So here’s a closing question. For the nonprofit leader that’s watching or listening today, who feels the pressure to grow, prove and perform, but senses the organization needs to listen more deeply first, what is one practical step you would recommend they take this week?

Jacob Adams

Go talk to the neighborhood, go talk to the community. If you can’t do it, set your team up to do it. Like three, four questions that help you develop a better understanding of what… That will help you have a better understanding of what the community needs. If you work with unhoused folks, you can be thinking about questions that help you better understand what it takes to build trust with them, because that’s a very relational work. So if you’re trying to get them housed, they need to trust you first. Your questions could be around that. You know, if it’s, you’re working in the clinic and you’re trying to understand, you want to make a better experience for the people that come in the clinic, what are questions you can ask them so you can better understand what’s bringing them here, what do they want from here, what do they like, what would they change? And that’s it, you don’t need to… You don’t need to worry about pushing, you know. The whole point of the exercise is to really talk to the folks in the neighborhood and the community so you can better understand what they want and what they need from you.

Hugh Ballou

Jacob, thank you. You’ve helped us rethink growth, listening, and partnership. The reminder I’m taking from this conversation is that sustainable scale is not something we impose from the outside. It grows from what we are willing to learn and strengthen from the inside. You can learn more about Jacob Adams and InnerSpark Lab at innersparklab.org. And to our listeners and viewers, thank you for joining us for this episode of the The Nonprofit Exchange. Jacob, thank you again for sharing your wisdom with our audience today. Hey, thank you.